Patriotism In Walt Whitman's Song Of Myself

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syllabus History books nor history itself can erase the fact that all of us has patriotism towards our own countries. It can be quite reasonable for many American writers in the 19th century to show off their own American national identity. However, America consists of various immigrants with different national backgrounds. Therefore, in American nationalism, patriotism need not to be confused with nationalism since nationalism is attached to the desire for power to serve other purposes be it political or self-promotional. America 's mission is to establish and secure the existence of a non-existing identity which is used to unite all of its 50 states. However, would America be the America today if it had been settled by British settlers in …show more content…

America was rife with self-promoting writers eager for distinction and stimulating the uniqueness of their country. The reason of the two poems having prefaces is to mold people 's way of interrupting the poem as if telling the reader to cut his sense of interpretation and follow the lead. In Song of Myself, Whitman keeps saying the word "he" to implicitly refer to himself. Moreover, by hearing the phrase "The Bard", we think of Shakespeare, but Whitman used the bard to promote himself as the greatest bard of America. Describing how he has beard and he has his shirt unbuttoned at the top to illustrate that he is proudly American, Whitman tries to establish an American national identity out of the same English cloths ,but with an Americanized changes made to them. Those changes are quite clever since we can detect that a man is Khaleeje or not by observing his way of clothes which is mostly Thob (white piece of clothing). In The Columbiad, Barlow claimed that he took the freedom to make some changes in the description of the events that 's about to be described in the poem. That demonstrates self-promoting since that information itself is not necessary in the Preface because judging from the title, the author obviously didn 't witness the time Columbus was there and the events which happened